Chapter 1 #2
Much like my first five years of life. Upon reflection, perhaps cause for some concern, or at least curiosity, but my parents instead built family mythology where there might have been value in professional psychology – ‘you just waited until you had something worthy to say’.
I only need look to the people who say the most to know there is no correlation between output and worthiness.
Family mythology has allowed anecdotes to do the heavy lifting, allowed the onus to fall on me.
But I happen to think that four-year-old Nora could have had something of value to share, had she been given the chance.
From an early age, my behaviour was certainly communicating a level of internal unease with the state of being alive – the forced participation, ongoing compulsory service, and achievement-oriented growth markers that were the only ones recognised never felt comfortable to me.
Who dreamt these parameters into being? I am, in contrast, a strong advocate of the participation ribbon, which positions me at odds with the majority as a starting point.
Every year of survival in this world is worth celebrating, in and of itself, though I suppose what I have dreamt up in this instance is birthdays.
It is this kind of moment, deep in rumination, on the cusp of the profound, when the starkest reminder of my not-okayness dawns.
This bitch thinks she just invented birthdays.
Take a breather. Until the festivities begin, this quiet hour steels me in the softest way.
Nobody pays it any attention, and if they do it is only to scorn it as an ‘ungodly hour’, but I celebrate this all the more.
There are no knocks or intrusions. I sit back in bed, safe from human interference, limbs loose, and exist, amongst pillows and blankets and all the gentle things.
When I am alone, I can lay it all down, the things I must remember to carry in my mind to be a real person in the world.
The right questions to ask and the subtle expectations around manners that people demand but never think to explain.
The pace and the beats of it all, and the need to smile, smile, smile.
I do not smile when I am alone, though that is when I feel most at ease.
A smile is a performance as much as anything else.
These things have only grown heavier with age, and at this point I have been forced to reassess the plan for moving forward, because the current system is unsustainable.
I have not treated myself well, and I have not treated others well either.
But how does one go about enacting such monumental life changes, when one does not have enough mental energy to make it through the day without losing their proverbial shit?
Tree by tree, perhaps. Retracing one’s steps, finding the point where the path diverged, starting over from there.
There are wallabies by the back fence eating dew-kissed grass in the first moments of perfect, perfect light.
A person cannot truly understand the colour pink if they have not seen this kind of sky.
Of course, I think of Fran. To try to recall a time when my life was even slightly more on track is to think of Fran.
I have never wanted to be someone more than the person he saw in me.
Do I know her? No, not at all, but I know him, to his bones.
My perception of his being is so strong, I often wonder if I could summon him with the power of my thoughts.
Always, I start with the first time we met.
When I was eleven, my mother bought me an antique wooden desk, the kind with the built-in seat and a lid that lifts to store treasures inside.
She found it online and maybe it was from an old schoolhouse, or maybe I just imagined it was, to make me feel more like Anne of Green Gables.
Memory is an odd thing, though perhaps fact and fiction do not meld so easily for others as they do for me.
Whatever its origin, I remember Dad carrying it in from the back of his ute – he had picked it up on the way home from work – and we positioned it at the window to face out towards the garden, my downstairs room feeling sometimes like a dungeon and other times a magical world of its own.
I did my homework at the desk in the afternoons, draping vines a backdrop to my imaginings.
If I didn’t think about long division I could do it just fine, and so I daydreamed in the vacant corners of my mind while the maths part did its thing.
Instead of storing my pens and notebooks inside my desk, I set up little rooms for my toys to live in, secret and tucked away.
Sometimes I made things out of cardboard or paper, and other times I repurposed items from around the house.
Nothing delighted me more at that age than an empty toilet roll or small postage box.
I longed to join my toys in these handcrafted scenes, tiny and out of sight.
Not quite being in my body gave me a somewhat lagging reaction time, and I stared in confusion for a moment at the small form that popped up in my blurred line of vision, all elbows and feathers.
Sounds came at me, at a slower speed than the visual, and I was forced to recite my most-asked and least-preferred question.
‘What did you say?’
‘Is this your chicken?’
The smiling boy held up Chook Chook at the window with the ease of someone who trusted animals and knew they trusted him. My favourite chicken, on account of her crooked beak, could not have looked more serene there in his grasp.
I got up from my desk and walked to the door that led out to the patio. Later it would be the door I snuck out of at night, and staggered back in through at some obscene hour of the morning, but here it served its first real purpose – connecting me to him.
‘Yeah, where did you find her?’ I asked, reaching out to take her off his hands.
‘She was in our yard and we’ve got a dog. He’s a good dog, his name is Ranger, but you never know, he hasn’t met a chicken before,’ he replied.
Chook Chook squirmed in my arms, and I dropped her by my feet on the pavers.
She went on her way, to hunt grasshoppers, or climb the mandarin tree, or scratch up the garden beds and make my mother mad.
I held out my hand to shake his, because that was what my parents did when they met someone new, and I wanted to get it right.
I did hold within me a desire to get things right.
If he found it odd, or formal, or cold, he certainly did not show it.
‘I’m Fran, we just moved in next door. The green house with the really pointy roof. I’m ten,’ he said, gripping my hand lightly but shaking it vigorously, like he was getting sand off a towel.
‘I’m Nora, we’ve always lived here, I’m eleven,’ I replied.
We stared at each other with curiosity and our hands stayed gripped long after the introductions were over.
We were babies, really, but already ourselves.
Or at least Fran was. His hair was long, longer than mine, his smile bookended with the loveliest dimples, and his T-shirt hung down to his knees, waiting for a growth spurt that would take another four years to arrive.
I remember staring at his face, taking it in, and thinking I would work hard to make him my friend.
I sensed goodness in him and hoped I could hide my not-goodness for as long as it took to reach the point of friendship no-returnsies.
He did not, to my knowledge, go to my school and did not know how I could be.
It felt important at that time to have a friend who did not know how I could be.
‘Hey, do you like Zappos?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I love them,’ he replied.
‘Do you want to come into my room and hang out? I’ve got a whole bucket of them.’
‘What flavour?’
‘Strawberry.’
‘Oh yeah, they’re so much better than grape.’
‘I know, they’re my favourite.’
I led him in to reveal the plastic container of sweets I had saved up to purchase at the bulk-buying place Mum insisted on driving to a few times a year to buy toilet paper and olive oil.
We did not talk for a while, partly because Zappos had a way of sticking your teeth together that made it impossible to open your jaw, and partly, it felt, because we were absorbing other information from one another, the kind that needed silence to take it in.
Fran moved in a way that felt alien to me, loose-limbed and soft and unaware.
I envied that, and the ease it brought to me in his presence.
I noticed that I was twirling the signet ring my grandfather William, Dad’s dad, had given me for my tenth birthday, my last gift from him, the one with the diamond in it. Fran was watching too.
‘It’s a diamond,’ I said, holding out my hand to show him.
‘Cool, it’s really nice,’ he replied.
‘What is your birthstone?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, what month were you born in?’
‘September – it’s my birthday soon.’
‘I don’t know the September one, let me look it up.’
It was thrilling to have something to share with him, and I flicked through my gem book with too much haste, unable to find the right page. I took some deep breaths to slow myself down and find what I was looking for.
‘Sapphire, oh that’s a good one,’ I told him, holding open the page for him to see.
‘Wow, so it means . . .’
He took the book and read the paragraph that described all the ways a sapphire symbolised and protected those people born in September, his eyes alight.
‘So, it basically means I’m royalty,’ he said, enthusiastic and proud.
I took the book back from him and read it for myself.
‘You’re sincere and faithful and honest,’ I explained.
‘I am,’ he agreed.
These kinds of things – star signs and birthstones and the Chinese zodiac – all meant so much to me at that age.
Mum and Dad had been raised Catholic, casual observers by the time they had us, though definitely still present enough to choose to enrol us in the school run under that banner over the state school that was much closer to our house.
They were on friendly terms with the local priest, Father Jason, as if this was Mum’s backup plan if things ever went south.
But no sickness or tragedy befell us, and so we never had any reason to go to Mass on Sundays, much to my Grandma Sue’s disappointment.
This left me to find my faith in other predetermined things that could tell me who I was.
It gave me the sense that I could focus my energy on my strengths, and forgive myself a little for the weaknesses that were built into my making.
My explosive temper was because I was an Aries, rather than a fundamentally broken and bad kid.
‘What does diamond mean?’ Fran asked.
‘I’m strong and determined,’ I replied, not needing to look it up as I had learned it by heart.
He cracked a smile like morning light. This is a memory I would live in, if I could. Fran told me a few years later that he knew we would be friends forever that day. I am not exactly sure when he changed his mind.